Or how I learned to stop worrying and reclaim my disk space.

About two months ago, the engineering team set out to Dockerize one of our
services, it being the container technology to finally vanquish the evil that is
virtualization, and bring about peace on Earth. While we grossly underestimated
the effort that would go into it, and much like Tolkien's hobbit regretted ever
having ever left the Shire. It paid off in the end, though, but that's another
blog post. Deploying our problem judging backend across multiple machines
running different operating systems is now a breeze. This post details one of
the major snags we ran into while developing a Docker image from scratch -
accumulation of garbage on disk, and also how to quickly get rid of it all.

Over the course of development, you will end up with a plethora of dangling
images, and unused volumes on your hard drive. Sometimes, this also leads to
your builds complaining about a lack of space on the device. Here's what you
need to do to spring clean.

Remove Images

Grab all images (including stopped ones with):

docker ps -a

After a while, this is an annoyingly long list. Remove a single image with:

docker rmi CONTAINER_ID

Force removal with:

docker rmi --force CONTAINER_ID

However, with some command line fu, you can remove everything in one go:

docker ps -a | tail +2 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I{} docker rmi --force {}

Copy pasters can stop reading at this point, but here's an explanation:

docker ps -a | tail +2 spits out all but the leading line in the output, which
gets rid of the table headings. Piping that to awk gives us only the first
column, which is now a newline separated list of CONTAINER_IDs. Finally, we
use xargs to execute the command docker rmi --force to force removal of each
of the images.

Docker Prune

You also have a more powerful command at your disposal - docker system prune.
It will remove unused Docker data from your system.

If you really want to nuke everything, do this.

docker system prune --all

Here's the self explanatory warning it spits out:

WARNING! This will remove:
	- all stopped containers
	- all volumes not used by at least one container
	- all networks not used by at least one container
	- all images without at least one container associated to them

I've cleaned up > 20 gigs of junk on my hard drive on two separate occasions
with these.

Now go burn that cache to the ground. Follow
@prajjwalsin while you're at
it.